HL Deb 13 December 1995 vol 567 cc1314-28

5.40 p.m.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Blatch)

My Lords, I beg leave to repeat the Statement made by my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in another place about the Government's plans for the future of Her Majesty's Stationery Office and how these might affect Parliament. The Statement is as follows:

"For most of the past 200 years, HMSO provided free supplies to departments and to Parliament, charging its costs to funds allocated in the Vote. In 1980 HMSO began recovering the costs. Within two years, departments were freed from their obligations to purchase from HMSO, which then had to compete with private sector suppliers. HMSO and its staff met the new challenge and the business became increasingly commercial, competitive and productive. In 1988 HMSO became an executive agency. I pay tribute to the management and staff of HMSO for their commercial success in recent years.

"But the public sector market in which HMSO competes is shrinking. Between 1990 and 1994 HMSO's turnover fell by more than 10 per cent. Job losses are likely unless HMSO is able to seek new sales opportunities.

"Against that background, the Government plan to privatise HMSO by means of a competitive tender offer. The business will benefit from access to wider markets. Staff will benefit from the increased security of a thriving business. Customers like Parliament will benefit from an accountable, commercially enforceable relationship with a supplier well positioned to reduce costs.

"We intend to retain in the public sector only a small residual body which will continue to bear the name HMSO. Its responsibilities will include Crown copyright. The residual body could also administer parliamentary copyright if Parliament so wished. Retaining responsibility for copyright in the public sector will allow us to sustain and improve the accessible and affordable publication of government information.

"The remainder of the business, which is the bulk, under the name of "The Stationery Office", will be offered for sale. We will seek a buyer who will maintain the independence and integrity of HMSO. Under no circumstances will we offer the printing and publishing businesses separately. I placed earlier today in the Library of the House the information pack which we are using to elicit market interest.

"Our objectives will be: to maximise value for money for the taxpayer; to ensure that staff are treated fairly and their rights respected; to ensure that the needs of Parliament and other customers such as government departments are satisfied; and to complete the privatisation as soon as practicable.

"The maintenance of a first-class service to Parliament is, of course, essential. The key point is that the buyer must be fully acceptable to Parliament. With that in mind, I intend to publish the short list of bidders in due course, and will involve parliamentary officials in the selection of the successful candidate.

"Parliament's requirements will be enshrined in a binding and enforceable contract, based on the new supply and service agreements between HMSO and Parliament, which takes effect from 1st January 1996. The contract could include the provision that any future changes in the structure or operation of the Stationery Office should take account of Parliament's requirements. And potential purchasers will have to honour recently negotiated improvements such as reductions in the price of publications and, I hope, negotiate further reductions.

"Parliament benefits from the dedication of trained and experienced staff in HMSO. The type of sale we envisage would mean the buyer taking on HMSO's staff with their existing terms and conditions.

"The Government are sure that the interests of HMSO, its customers, its staff, the taxpayer and Parliament will best be served by privatisation along the lines that I have set out. But uncertainty, particularly for staff, necessarily accompanies a change of this sort. The Government will aim to complete the sale by summer next year, but subject always to meeting the requirements of Parliament as a pre-requisite".

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

Having repeated the Statement, I should like to add that I have seen the report published today from the Offices Committee of your Lordships' House. In that report, the committee draws attention to a number of requirements which it would regard as essential if a privatised HMSO were to continue to meet the needs of the House for the printing and publishing of parliamentary papers. We shall, of course, consider those points with care. But I have no reason to think that they cannot be met.

My noble friend the Lord Privy Seal intends to seek an early opportunity for a debate on all those issues. The points raised on that occasion will give us a further opportunity to ensure that your Lordships' concerns can be taken fully into account. An official of the House is being involved as an observer at every stage in the preparation for privatisation to ensure that the needs of this House are fully understood.

In due course, the Offices Committee will be invited to consider the detailed arrangements for a contractual relationship between the House and a privatised Stationery Office. It will be for the committee and, ultimately, your Lordships, to judge whether those arrangements are satisfactory. I am convinced that a comprehensive contractual package can be assembled which will take full account of the needs of Parliament. Indeed, I hope that the advantages of privatisation will make it possible to secure further reductions in real terms in the price of parliamentary papers, an objective which I know is dear to the hearts of many of your Lordships.

5.46 p.m.

Lord Peston

My Lords, I should like to thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in another place. However, I must say at the outset that I am in some difficulty. I say that because normally when such a Statement is repeated I have a copy of it in front of me. I believe that I have a copy of the statement that was actually made in another place, but I do not have a full copy of the statement that the Minister just made; indeed, there are chunks of it towards the end that I have heard for the very first time. I should like to know whether that falls within the normal rules of your Lordships' House. If it does not, I must say that I am distinctly unhappy about the situation.

I should say immediately to the Minister that I can see the difficulty. On this particular occasion, a Statement which was suitable for the other place is not quite suitable for your Lordships' House. However, that does not mean that the principal Opposition spokesman should not have a full copy of such a Statement to enable him to have a look at it beforehand. I have to register the issue. It is not a personal matter between myself and the Minister; it is a matter of which I believe we ought to take note.

As I said, I believe that the Statement is directed in the first place towards the other place. However, I take it for granted that they can take care of themselves and, indeed, will no doubt do so when they debate the matter. Nevertheless, we have our own interests and I shall refer to them in due course, because they may not necessarily be identical to the interests of honourable and right honourable Members in another place.

I suppose the general question which we ought to start with, and which, in my judgment the Statement does not answer, is: what is the point of all this? Some general remarks are made in the Statement which the Minister repeated, but they hardly comprise a serious analysis of the whole issue. For example, the Statement says that, the business will benefit from access to wider markets". Can I see the evidence which supports that proposition? I am not very clear as to exactly what is the Office of the Duchy of Lancaster, but has it undertaken studies of such matters and can it demonstrate that claim?

More puzzling is the sentence in the Statement which says: Customers like Parliament will benefit from an accountable, commercially enforceable relationship with a supplier well positioned to reduce costs". Is that not what we have at present? Indeed, is it not precisely the position of HMSO? In other words, if we have to be more commercially minded, why can that not take place within the public sector?

In that connection, I must ask more specifically: just what is to be sold? What are the assets? We are discussing a multifarious business which is engaged in printing and publishing. Moreover, I have found out—as I have only recently discovered that I am the Opposition spokesman on Duchy of Lancaster matters—that the Stationery Office engages in activities like photocopying, which I gather is good business, and, indeed, in various other tasks of that nature.

Apart from some equipment and stock, surely HMSO's main asset is the actual contract that it has with Parliament, or more generally with the public sector. In what sense is that a saleable asset? In that connection, I ask the Minister whether it is possible to tell your Lordships in the broadest possible terms—I do not need a precise figure—how much money we are talking about here? Are we talking in terms of millions, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds? I do not wish to prejudice the negotiations with a possible buyer but I would still like to know what I am talking about before proceeding any further. This is a field in which I am interested but I have no idea of the sum of money that is involved. If someone were to ask me how much I thought the Government were talking about I would have to say that I had not the faintest idea. It would help noble Lords if the Minister could at least give us some guidance on that matter.

In that connection I note that an information pack will be placed in the Library. I have been assured that it is already in the Library of your Lordships' House but it is being indexed and therefore it is buried downstairs. I hope that by tomorrow plenty of copies of the information pack will be available to your Lordships, because if we are to proceed to examine this matter in any detail that is the least that we shall need.

The Statement refers to a shortlist of bidders that will be published. I hope I express the interest of all your Lordships when I ask again whether we shall have an opportunity to debate that shortlist and to express an opinion on the people in it. The Statement states that the buyer must be "fully acceptable to Parliament". I hope I am not mistaken, at least for the moment, in assuming that your Lordships' House is still part of Parliament and therefore that the buyer must be fully acceptable to your Lordships' House as well as to another place. I wish to emphasise—I hope the Minister agrees with this—that in my judgment this is a parliamentary matter and not a government matter. Will we be assured, therefore, that acceptability will be based on a free vote in which your Lordships will be free to express their opinions as they wish and believe in the interests of your Lordships' House, or will there be the usual process whereby the Government decide that they must place themselves on the line and there will be a heavy Whip and we shall see some of our noble friends whom we never see at any other time, trooping in in order to vote on the matter? I hope that will not be the case, because where the future of your Lordships' House is placed in debate—it is in a subject of public debate— a matter of this kind ought not to be dealt with on a three-line Government Whip.

I was puzzled as regards the reference made by the noble Baroness to the Offices Committee. Will the noble Baroness assure me that where she referred to the Offices Committee she meant the House of Lords Offices Committee on all occasions? I also note the reference to a debate, which we all welcome. Am I correct in assuming that this debate will take place at an early date before the ultimate buyer, or even the shortlist, is known because we need to debate the actual subject in the near future? I have been told that the other place will debate this subject next week. I believe there is little possibility that we could do that but I would certainly be unhappy if, with the other place having debated the matter, our debate took place at a much later date, as we have a contribution to make on our own behalf.

When we know the ultimate buyer, will we also then have a debate on whether we believe the safeguards have been met? I sit on the Offices Committee—that is why I check that that is the committee we have in mind—which agreed yesterday in its report that it should not be interpreted to mean that because the safeguards were met the committee then fully accepted that we should proceed with privatisation. In other words, we were at some pains to distinguish the question of privatisation from that of whether the safeguards are met. That is related to a matter which, again, I found surprising—your Lordships ought to allow me to emphasise this—and that is that the privatisation does not require legislation. When this matter first came up I was somewhat taken aback to discover that the Government can simply sell this business. Your Lordships ought to know that. There is the consideration that, no matter what we say, the Government can simply shrug and say, "We are selling it". I doubt whether they would do that if we had reservations, but I understand that the legal, statutory position is that they can do so.

I turn for a moment to the matter of copyright. It is not a matter I wish to dwell on today but it is a matter of some importance. It has been a concern not merely of mine but of many people interested in Crown and parliamentary copyright that Government and Parliament have been trying to earn too much from their ownership of copyright and therefore a great many public documents are priced so high that if an ordinary member of the public wished to obtain such documents he would find them extremely expensive to purchase. Taking a view of democracy, it seems to me an absurd state of affairs that the public at large should find it expensive to have access to documents on the laws of the land. Given our belief in open democratic government, I hope that copyright will be used from now on in a benign way in order that ordinary people will not find that the price of such documents is a deterrent to buying them. I am not suggesting that everyone wishes to buy Acts of Parliament. We shall return to that matter on another occasion, but I hope that in future copyright will be interpreted in an extremely generous way.

I return to the reason why this measure has been taken. Can I be told whether there has been any study of the performance of HMSO as regards your Lordships' House? Has there been any work done on that at all? Speaking for myself, my connection with HMSO is via the Printed Paper Office. Again speaking for myself, I have found the service absolutely first class. How many noble Lords have complained about HMSO? What sort of complaints have they made, or are most noble Lords, like me, quite bewildered by the whole of this business? There is an absolutely fascinating letter by Plantagenet Somerset Fry in today'sFinancial Times. He was HMSO first editor of books from 1975 to 1980. He reminds us that HMSO will be 210 years old next year; it is one of our oldest institutions. It was established to deal with certain problems in connection with corruption in the publishing of government documents and—if I may quote the precise words of the letter in theFinancial Times— to secure economy in government expenditure on printing and stationery". What I find most paradoxical of all is that the two great figures involved originally with the Stationery Office were Pitt the Younger and Edmund Burke. It is strange that I from these Benches should be calling up the shades of those two great men as opposed to the Conservative Party, which one might have thought would have taken some account of their sensitivities though they lie in their graves. My view is that this whole measure is nonsensical and I truly wish that Parliament's time was not being wasted with it.

Lord Harris of Greenwich

My Lords, at this time of seasonal good will to all men and women I am sure we all sympathise with the noble Baroness who has had the responsibility for bringing this dismal Statement to the House. We are talking about the privatisation of a good quality public service, intimately associated with Parliament, for entirely ideological reasons. On what conceivable grounds is HMSO to be privatised? What are the arguments? The points made by the Minister in another place were, to put it as politely as possible, extraordinarily unpersuasive.

I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, of what the all-party House of Commons Commission said on this matter when it expressed its concern, about the possible consequences both short and long-term of privatising a public sector organisation which has, in general, given good and reliable service to the House for most of this century". I return to the question of safeguards to which we devoted a fair amount of time in the Offices Committee last evening. What happens if, following the negotiations, this House comes to the conclusion that the safeguards for which we are asking have not been met? The noble Baroness says that the aim must be to provide a solution which is fully acceptable to Parliament. What happens if it is not? What happens if the House decides as a result of the negotiations that the minimum safeguards laid down by the Offices Committee and contained in its report, which is available from the Printed Paper Office, have not been met? We deserve an answer to that question. Do this House and the other place have a right of veto in relation to their own interests, or will the Government simply ignore the views that are expressed?

In particular, what is the position concerning the price of many House publications, includingHansard? Many of us welcome the new supply and service agreement negotiated with the Stationery Office under which, as from 1st January next year, the price ofHansard and other publications will be reduced. What is the guarantee that a privatised organisation will accept that there shall be no increase in real terms in the charges paid by this House for those publications or that the House will be credited with a proportionate share of future savings arising from technological advances? Again, those points, made by the House of Commons Commission, are essential to this debate.

There is another question of some importance. Will the contract have to be submitted to competitive tendering under EU procurement rules? The Treasury apparently claims that it will not. What is the basis for that opinion? Has any lawyer with detailed knowledge of European law who comes from outside the public service confirmed that? If so, who was it? I am not asking for a reply today, but I shall be grateful if the noble Baroness will write telling us the answer to that question.

The noble Lord, Lord Peston, says that the other place will discuss this matter next week. It is a matter of considerable urgency, affecting, as it does, the arrangements with HMSO which are central to our day-to-day work. Why can we not also have a debate next week and put off one of the days on the Bill dealing with criminal procedure? For other reasons too, that might be a sensible idea.

At present, HMSO is accountable directly to Ministers. If there is a failure to provide us with parliamentary papers on time a Minister is directly accountable. Who will be accountable to this House in future if privatisation is pushed through and serious problems arise thereafter?

This is a sad and silly proposal. I hope that it will be dropped. If it is not, Parliament has a responsibility to protect its rights and the public interest.

A noble Lord

My Lords—

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, it is the convention of the House that I respond to points made by the Official Opposition and from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench.

First, perhaps I may explain that when I came to the end of the Statement I said that I had come to the end and added an addendum. I do not know whether that is in contravention of the rules of the House, but I used the words, "having repeated the Statement." I continued with remarks that I thought would be helpful, given that I have only today read the report of the Offices Committee. I knew that it was directly relevant. I also said, and it is worth repeating, that it will be for the committee, and ultimately your Lordships, to judge whether the arrangements are satisfactory.

I was asked a direct question about what is to be sold. The whole of HMSO will be sold, except for a very small residual body. The sale will include office supplies, copiers, business systems, furniture, print and publishing. Parliamentary contracts are worth less than 10 per cent. of turnover. Therefore, the value cannot be guessed at this stage. It will depend on the trading position at the time of sale, and in any case it would not be right for me to state publicly at the Dispatch Box information which could prejudice the tendering process.

The cost of the service was raised. The contract will specify the arrangements for determination of prices. The new supply and service agreement which, as the noble Lord, Lord Peston, said, was agreed yesterday, provides for an annual review of charges and prices which will set maximum prices to be charged to external customers. I expect future price movements to be downwards rather than upwards.

The short list will not be available until the spring. Bidders have to have time to decide whether to participate. Ultimately the House has to be content and ready to sign a contract for services which is separate from the contract of sale. That is an important point. The range and extent of those services can be determined by the House before the sale.

I am happy to respond to a point that was pressed by the noble Lord, Lord Peston. I am not aware of anything other than praise for the quality of HMSO. However, HMSO will find it increasingly difficult to maintain those services without increasing costs against a background of diminishing total sales. Privatisation is the remedy. The new owner will bring additional capital. That has to be good for the security of the people who work within HMSO.

I was asked whether the sale will require primary legislation. My understanding is that my right honourable friend has been advised that there is no need for primary legislation, but he is currently seeking advice about whether any secondary legislation may be needed.

Again, very rightly, the noble Lord, Lord Peston, made the point that we have concerns in this House which may be different from those in another place. That is why this House will be represented in, and will be party to, all negotiations that take place between now and the completion of any sale, and the Offices Committee will be kept informed. I am sorry if the information pack is not immediately available, but it will be.

I was asked how much money the sale will generate. It is too early to say. There is a need to analyse closely the trading position for the current year and the forecasts for future years. The price will be influenced by terms and conditions of contracts with customers and what proportion of HMSO's future work they cover. Figures so far bandied about in the press are likely to be way out. However, I am optimistic that value for money will be achieved. That is one of the aims of the exercise.

The noble Lord, Lord Peston, asked whether we can debate the short list. At this moment I am not certain what the mechanisms will be for Members of this House to approve the contract terms. I know that officials of this House will be fully involved in the process. The Offices Committee will be fully involved and will certainly be party to the process. I cannot say at this time what mechanism the committee and the usual channels will determine to reflect the views of the whole House, but no doubt that will be a point that will be pressed in the debate that will follow.

Copyright was mentioned. That is another important point. Parliament, not HMSO or myself, is ultimately responsible for its own copyright. That is very much a matter for Parliament. If Parliament did not wish to take on the responsibility directly, that could continue to be administered on behalf of Parliament by the residual HMSO, which would also be responsible for the administration of Crown copyright and certain statutory functions. Prior to the sale of HMSO, decisions will have to be reached on the terms of copyright licences required by the new business. Decisions on parliamentary copyright are, of course, a matter for the House, and in the case of Crown copyright the Government will consider the licensing terms in the light of the need not to restrict unduly access to government material.

As I said, these days HMSO is a commercial organisation facing increased competition and shrinking markets, and therefore uncertainty about jobs in the future. Therefore, freedom from Civil Service constraints will allow the business to grow and prosper, and to compete on equal terms and expand its markets. Parliamentary officials will be involved in the process of drawing up criteria for selecting a new owner and in the choice of the new owner. Officials responsible for arrangements in this House and in another place have been invited to join the steering group for privatisation. The supply and service level agreements, which were signed yesterday, will form the basis of the contract for services.

I cannot imagine that at this late stage it would be convenient to the House to alter the business for next week, which has been on the Order Paper for some time. However, I take the point that the noble Lord made that we want a debate in this House as soon as possible. I know that that point has been properly registered with the usual channels on these Benches.

The noble Lord, Lord Harris, asked who will be responsible. There will continue to be a Minister responsible for HMSO who would, if the House so desired, both administer parliamentary copyright and monitor the contract with private business.

On the point of European Union procurement, at present we expect to be able to offer a contract based on the existing arrangements. If that should change in any way, I shall, of course, write to noble Lords. I made the point in the main Statement that contracts will be enforceable in law, and that is more than is currently available to the House.

6.11 p.m.

Lord Boyd-Carpenter

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that some of us find it rather disturbing that while another place will have the opportunity to debate this matter next week, this House, although equally affected, apparently has to wait for some indefinite date after Christmas. I wonder whether my noble friend will be prepared to reconsider the matter. It would be disappointing, of course, for those who are interested in next week's business if, on one of those days, business had to be postponed in order to make room for this matter. However, it is an issue which affects this House, as the noble Baroness admitted. Therefore, it does not seem right that while the Commons are to debate the matter at once and possibly have an impact on it, we have to wait some weeks. I ask my noble friend to reconsider the matter, either by shifting one of the items of business allocated for next week, or by sitting on Friday.

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, I can give my noble friend the assurance that his pressing request, and the rather persuasive way in which he put it, will be put to my noble friends the Chief Whip and the Leader of the House.

Lord Bruce of Donington

My Lords, perhaps I may ask the noble Baroness to explain the present status of HMSO. I gather that it is owned by the Government; otherwise they would have no power to dispose of it. Is it at present subject to the provisions of the Government Trading Act which, as noble Lords will recall, went through this House in all its stages in March and June 1990? At that time, and in aid of the provisions of the Government Trading Act, the Government Front Bench made great play of the fact that the provisions would apply to those agencies which were set out in the Government White Paper relating to the Next Steps agencies. So far as I know, HMSO was in the list of the Next Steps agencies included in the Government White Paper which formed the grounds of the Government Trading Act which passed through this House.

HMSO is either a Next Steps agency or it is not. If it is not, what is it? Is it subject to the Government Trading Act that was passed through Parliament? Subject to the answer that I receive from the noble Baroness regarding the precise status, I have to give her notice that if at this time it is a Next Steps agency referred to in the Government's own White Paper, I shall have to indict the Government. Its disposal or privatisation would be completely against the undertakings given by the Minister in this House concerning the future and its possible privatisation. My next action, or, I hope, those of my noble friends on the Front Bench, will depend precisely on that answer.

In the meantime, I have only two observations. One covers the other place, and the other relates to your Lordships' House. The price of Hansard overing the activities of another place in 1979 was 45p. That was also the price at that time of your Lordships' Hansard. At present the price of the Official Report of another place is £7.50, a rise of about 1,500 per cent. since the Government took office. The price of the Official Report of this House is now£4.20, an increase of over 800 per cent.

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, perhaps I may take the final point first. As regards prices, the predictions are that if nothing changes the situation could become worse. One of the aims of the changes is that we should receive a more cost effective service. That cost effectiveness will be passed on to customers purchasing HMSO documents.

As regards status, as I understand it HMSO is a trading fund and a Next Steps agency. One of the problems is that the body is limited to publicly funded customers. The whole point of the new arrangements would be to free it up to be on equal footing with a private company and thereby to have access to greater markets.

Lord Harmar-Nicholls

My Lords, for a long period verbatim proceedings of this House were not printed. We depended upon the bound copies of The Times such as we have in the corridors of this House. When it was decided to print Hansard, was that decision made by the government of the day or by Parliament? The answer may assist the Government as a precedent for what they wish to do now.

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, I am not able to tell my noble friend whether that decision was made by Parliament or by an agency on behalf of Parliament. It will be for this House to take a view about the service level it requires. It will be for this House to assure itself that there is no compromising whatever over the services required by this House. Therefore, it would be this House and the other House safeguarding their own interests, as the noble Lord, Lord Peston, pointed out.

Lord Harris of Greenwich

My Lords, will the noble Baroness be kind enough to deal with two points which I put earlier. She did not cover them in her reply. I asked specifically what happens if this House were to come to the conclusion that the terms of the eventual settlement were unsatisfactory. Does it have the right simply to reject them and will the Government honour that decision?

Secondly, I asked whether she would write to me on the question of the EU procurement rules. I asked a far more detailed question than the one she answered. I should be grateful if she will reply to me in writing.

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, I said I would write to the noble Lord on EU procurement. As regards the other point, if we are not satisfied as a House, then we do not have to sign up to these arrangements. Therefore if the terms are unsatisfactory, and we cannot so safeguard, or the levels of service in this House are so compromised, then this House does not have to sign up.

It is also important to remember that this House on its own is not a very large customer. Therefore, if all the other areas of the Crown plus the other place decide to sign up, we may find ourselves having to consider having our needs satisfied by another customer. But we are not bound to sign up, and we are very definitely empowered to safeguard our own interests.

Lord Dubs

My Lords, I am not sure that I understood the last point. Perhaps I may seek clarification. The Minister stated that in order not to prejudice the bids coming in, she is not able to say how much the whole enterprise is worth. Given that we have had experience in the past of privatisations which have been too cheap—as evidenced by subsequent takeovers—is there a price below which the Government will not sell HMSO?

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, it is inappropriate to be discussing this kind of detail across the Dispatch Box at this stage in the process. What is absolutely certain and very important is that officials representing the interests of this House are fully involved in the process and that the House Committee is fully informed at all stages, and that they are involved in the shortlisting process and are ultimately party to the decision as to whether to enter into a contract. The terms of the contract would include the price the Government will receive and the levels of service that will be satisfied by the contracts that will be determined by the House. All those separate interests are safeguarded. To be talking now about the value of the company, to be pre-empting at this stage trading conditions and future prospects, is very premature. As I understand it, that will all be part of an information memorandum which will become public much nearer the time.

Lord Hayhoe

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that there will be a widespread welcome for the emphasis that she laid today upon the meeting of parliamentary requirements? As I understood the Statement, that matter will be paramount in the consideration of carrying forward this policy of privatisation, which seems to be a quite separate issue. Can my noble friend give an indication as to whether any time limit will apply to the binding contract ensuring that the parliamentary interests of this House and indeed the other place are paramount in the arrangements made? What sanctions will be available if the new body concerned with the printing and publication of our proceedings and papers fails to meet those requirements?

I say this with some concern since, when I was responsible for HMSO a long while ago, it dealt with, of all things, the printing of telephone directories. When that function was put out to private suppliers, one of those interested was a Mr. Maxwell. I am glad to say that he did not secure that particular arrangement; I had a hand in that at the time. Think of the difficulties that might arise if a future Mr. Maxwell were running the company responsible for printing all our parliamentary papers! Are we absolutely clear that proper safeguards will be in place?

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, again, my noble friend is absolutely right. I am happy to go on emphasising the importance of knowing what we want in terms of levels of service and making sure that they are properly specified. We have made a good start. Yesterday, service level agreements were signed both by this House and another place. I have made it clear that they will form the basis of a contract under the new arrangements. I am also happy to say that it will be for Parliament to determine the duration of the contracts, and they will be legally enforceable. That is what is important: knowing our own mind, safeguarding our own interests, and making sure that the contract is drawn up in a way that is legally enforceable.

Lord Haskel

My Lords, it seems to me that the purpose of this privatisation is to get costs down and find new markets. Why, then, can we not just follow the well-trodden path of getting in some new management to introduce new technology, bring the costs down and give the service that is required? Is the reason that that would merely add to government spending and therefore HMSO has to be privatised? Surely it would be better to reorganise the business under its present ownership and thereby retain all the security about which noble Lords are concerned.

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, I believe the noble Lord has completely missed the point I made. HMSO has made enormous strides under the new arrangements of being a trading fund and a Next Steps agency. It has effected a number of very important changes—

Lord Graham of Edmonton

In the public sector.

Baroness Blatch

within the public sector, which have produced increased cost-effectiveness. What it cannot do anything about is the shrinking market and its inability to trade outside publicly funded organisations. The reasons for privatisation are to give security to the workforce, to allow HMSO to grow and prosper and to allow it access to other markets. That is the purpose— to secure both the quality of our own service and at the same time allow this very good organisation the freedom to go out and secure more work for its staff and sell its talents on the open market. That is very important. Certainly many of the remarks made today about this privatisation have been made generally about almost all the privatisations. In the end, privatisation has worked in terms of value for money for the customer.

Lord Burnham

My Lords, I do not feel that it is frivolous to ask by what name this new privatised body is to be known. If it continues to be Her Majesty's Stationery Office, it will enjoy the privileges and conditions relating to the printing of parliamentary documents that it enjoys today. However, if, as I suspect, it is to be thrown into the commercial maw and jungle of the printing industry, life will be very different. It will find it extremely difficult, on commercial, price and other grounds, to continue to give the service that we receive from the Stationery Office today. Can my noble friend give any assurance that, even if it is in the commercial printing world, standards will remain the same as they are today?

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, first, I cannot see any difference in principle. I do not see at all why the private sector cannot provide a quality service. Certainly, if we have the safeguards of having a well drawn up specification, legally enforceable, we can demand the quality of service that we specify. Also, it is worth knowing that HMSO at this moment contracts out to the private sector. Quite a portion of its work is contracted out to commercial companies and is done to the specification of HMSO on behalf of the Government. The title HMSO will remain in the public sector because the residual body will continue to use it. But I cannot say, and it is very unlikely, that the title HMSO will continue beyond that point. The Government's contract, whether Crown or Parliament, is very prestigious. That will mean a great deal to any company outside Whitehall.

Lord Richard

My Lords, perhaps I may ask one very simple question. If the object of the exercise is, as the noble Baroness just told us, that the new Stationery Office can go out and seek new markets, why not give the existing Stationery Office precisely that power now?

Baroness Blatch

My Lords, there is something improper in the taxpayer supporting a commercial company. It would be very unfair. There would not be a level playing field with the rest of the private sector if the taxpayer underpinned the interest of a commercial company.

Lord Graham of Edmonton

That is what it is all about.

Baroness Blatch

There is no reason whatever why this very efficient service cannot stand on its own two feet in the private sector and seek the custom of the Government in all its forms, whether through the Crown or through Parliament. The principle (perhaps the noble Lord supports it) of the taxpayer taking on the business of supporting and underpinning all the rest of a private company is improper.